A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Abbreviations

With China's reform and open-door policy, China's contact and communication with the outside has been highly strengthened, its economic development and scientific and technological achievements have been unprecedentedly fast, and also people's lives have been changing by leaps and bounds, all of which have a higher demand to use simple and easy-to-remember language forms to express new-born things and new phenomena. With the entry into the 21st century and with the rapid and sound development of globalization, everything is changing at an even higher speed. Just in such a situation, in order to carry out mutual communication in an effective and convenient way, the study and development of abbreviations are comparably fast. It is the due result to use abbreviations with simple forms but full and large information, which aims to increase efficiency and reduce unnecessary and long forms.In both Chinese and English languages, there exist a large number of abbreviations, including the codes, shorthand, symbols and signs, all of which are also seen as part of abbreviations. Abbreviations, with the goal to exchange information and thoughts among people in the most economical way to meet the demands of the ever-changing society, have played a greater role in today's world.It is from the economy principle. A good many experts in cognitive science, psycholinguistics and pragmatics have already brought about and made an analysis on this theory and also abbreviations can be seen in nearly every field and style in our daily life, but the study and research of abbreviations between English and Chinese are rare. This paper aims to, through contrast and comparison of English and Chinese abbreviations, explain their differences and similarities from the perspective of structures, pronunciations, writing, grammar and figure, and also at the same time tries to point out the problems in using them and something that should be paid attention to and at last make a prospect of its future development.The study is an empirical one, mainly based on qualitative analysis of the data. The data under investigation include abbreviations in different fields and styles both in English and Chinese, among which some are popular among people, while others have already disappeared. In the end, this paper tends to make contribution to the research and study of abbreviations.